Publisher's Synopsis
Four Plays of Aeschylus The Suppliant Maidens The Persians The Seven Against Thebes The Prometheus Bound By Aeschylus The surviving dramas of Aeschylus are seven in number, though he is believed to have written nearly a hundred during his life of sixty-nine years, from 525 B.C. to 456 B.C. That he fought at Marathon in 490, and at Salamis in 480 B.C. is a strongly accredited tradition, rendered almost certain by the vivid references to both battles in his play of The Persians, which was produced in 472. But his earliest extant play was, probably, not The Persians but The Suppliant Maidens-a mythical drama, the fame of which has been largely eclipsed by the historic interest of The Persians, and is undoubtedly the least known and least regarded of the seven. Its topic-the flight of the daughters of Danaus from Egypt to Argos, in order to escape from a forced bridal with their first-cousins, the sons of Aegyptus-is legendary, and the lyric element predominates in the play as a whole. We must keep ourselves reminded that the ancient Athenian custom of presenting dramas in Trilogies -that is, in three consecutive plays dealing with different stages of one legend-was probably not uniform: it survives, for us, in one instance only, viz. the Orestean Trilogy, comprising the Agamemnon, the Libation-Bearers, and the Eumenides, or Furies. This Trilogy is the masterpiece of the Aeschylean Drama: the four remaining plays of the poet, which are translated in this volume, are all fragments of lost Trilogies-that is to say, the plays are complete as poems, but in regard to the poet's larger design they are fragments; they once had predecessors, or sequels, of which only a few words, or lines, or short paragraphs, survive. It is not certain, but seems probable, that the earliest of these single completed plays is The Suppliant Maidens, and on that supposition it has been placed first in the present volume.
